The Cro-Magnon People

I remember when I was a young girl, one of my older sisters did a project for the school science fair. She was comparing 3 types of early humans; Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons and modern humans. I was fascinated by the display she made, and that was probably what started my attraction to all things pre-historic. But people don’t speak of Cro-Magnons anymore, and I finally found out why.

Human evolution is filled with terms and names related to past humans that can get quite confusing. Cro-Magnons are an example of that. They lived in Europe around the time of the last Ice Age, from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. They were initially named after the Cro-Magnon rock shelter in France where the first of their skeletons were discovered in the 1860s. Now, however, scientists refer to them as Early Modern Humans or Anatomically Modern Humans.

The bones of the first Cro-Magnon specimens were discovered in 1868 during road construction in the Dordogne Valley in southwestern France. The remains were of 4 adults and an infant. The rock shelter where they were found showed clear signs of occupation, including ornaments such as pendants and necklaces made from shells and animal teeth. This led researchers to believe the occupants had been deliberately buried in the shelter as a single grave.

Scientists compared the skeletons to those of Neanderthals that had been discovered in England and later in France. They came to the conclusion that the Cro-Magnons were distinct enough to warrant their own designation. However, advances in anthropology and genetics eventually established that these people were fully modern humans, indistinguishable from people today. Therefore, the term ‘Cro-Magnon’ was phased out by the end of the 20^th century, as they were recognized as part of a larger population of early modern humans who migrated across Europe, Asia, and Africa during the Upper Palaeolithic era.

Another reason why the name was changed was because ‘Cro-Magnon’ did not refer to a specific taxonomy; it was the name of a cave and was considered inappropriate for palaeontology.

The individuals found at Cro-Magnon were anatomically similar to people living today. They had high foreheads, prominent chins and slight brow ridges. They were generally taller than Neanderthals, sometimes by as much as a foot. And their skeletons indicate they lived tough, physically demanding lives.

The skull of Cro-Magnon 1, an adult man found at the cave, shows signs of a fungal infection, while some of the others had fused vertebrae in their necks, which would have likely come from traumatic injuries. And one of the females found at the site appears to have lived with a fractured skull.

Despite living through extremely difficult conditions, the ‘Cro-Magnon’ people lived in complex social structures. Archaeologists have recovered sophisticated tools made from bone, stone, and antlers. They also had artistic creations such as cave paintings, jewelry, decorated artifacts, and carvings. They are recognized for creating some of the earliest depictions of animals and human figures, as well as abstract patterns.

So, it appears that, rather than being very distant relatives like the Neanderthals, the ‘Cro-Magnons’ are simply a part of the human family. I can’t blame my sister for having erroneous information in her project, considering she put it together in the late 1950s with the best information she could find in the small town where we lived. And I’m still fascinated with pre-history.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/who-were-the-cro-magnon-people/ar-AA1tKDNb?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=2f57b4f4f07b49a58069b2bf77c09911&ei=69

Distant Ancestors

In my never-ending quest to get my science knowledge a little more up-to-date (the better to write science fiction), I periodically surf the net in search of interesting but not too complicated science articles. This past week, I ran across quite a few articles about Neanderthals; when they died out, where they died out, why they died out, and so on.

You know about the Neanderthals; big heavy brows, broad flat noses, short chunky bodies. All those characteristics were helpful to them as they lived in Europe during ice age conditions. I don't remember how the heavy brows were helpful, but the noses helped warm the frigid air before it hit their lungs, and their compact bodies conserved body heat.

Up until recently, it was believed that the last of the Neanderthals died out in the area of Spain about 40-42,000 years ago, helped along on the road to extinction by the arrival of 'modern man' into Europe shortly before the demise of the Neanderthals. It wasn't certain that the two groups came into direct conflict and poked holes into one another, but if nothing else, they were both vying for the same food supply, and it was thought Neanderthals just couldn't effectively compete.

According to what I read this week, a new dating technique for old skeletons and other remains has now pushed the demise of the Spanish Neanderthals to around 50,000 years ago. So, were they completely gone before 'modern man' arrived? Probably not. The scientists were going to be conducting more tests on other sites, but it was rather expected that the new dating technique would also push back the date of modern man's arrival into Europe a similar amount of time. So, other than changing the position of a couple dots on a timeline, this didn't really change much.

On the other hand, genetic anthropologists have been analyzing tiny bits of Neanderthal DNA wherever they could find it, and by combining the results of all their work, they figure they've got about 12% of a complete Neanderthal DNA workup.

And it seems Jean Auel was correct when she wrote in Clan of the Cave Bear that Neanderthals and modern man had babies together. Scientists have compared current DNA to Neanderthal DNA and found that modern people have as much as 2% of their DNA from Neanderthals. The amount varies between ethnicities, but it's there.

So... I blame my son's unibrow on Several-times-great-grandfather Oogh, of the German Neanderthals.

Dogs of the World

I like dogs. (I love cats, but that's another story.) Lately I've been reading a few articles having to do with the genealogy of dogs, particularly in the Americas.

When I was a kid, school described North American indian tribes as having horses and ponies. I was too young to question that at the time. Later, it was explained that the ponies originated with the Spanish explorers in Mexico, and that they quickly spread throughout North America. I assumed the indian dogs were a similar story.

But it turns out that dogs had already been here when the Spaniards, the Vikings, and other Europeans arrived. It had been assumed that when the indigenous people died out, their dogs died with them, having no one to take care of them.

These recent articles explained that the original 'American' dogs came over the land bridge from Asia and Siberia with the people who became indigenous indian tribes. Those dogs did not die out and were not supplanted by European dogs. They survived, interbred with the European dogs, and are still here.

This was discovered by comparing the DNA of American dogs with that of Asian and European dogs. The American DNA was much closer to the Asian DNA than the European DNA. This was true as far east as Greenland.

So the Mexican hairless, the Peruvian hairless, and any number of other breeds are about as American as they can get.

My family has a mutt. He's a great addition to our family, and I assume he's an 'American' mutt. How about you? Tell me about your dog.

A Rose by Any Other Name...

We’re all aware that language evolves, right?

Somewhere in school - probably in an English class - the teacher gave us a glimpse at that evolution. Language in Europe and Asia started from an unknown Indo-European language that split into other languages, including Germanic and Latin. Latin developed into French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. That was all we heard about the ‘Romance Languages’.

That teacher spent much more time on the Germanic tongue. I remember she mentioned High German and Low German, though I don’t remember what the difference was. As I remember it, the Low German used in the British Isles became Old English, then Middle English, and eventually, something that resembled the English we speak today. To emphasize how much the English language had changed, she had us students read The Canterbury Tales - in the original (Old? Middle? I don’t remember).

It seemed hopeless, but I tried. If I was lucky, I might have seen 1 word out of 10 that possibly bore some semblance to a modern word, although the meaning had probably changed. Our ‘reading’ of the Tales was more of her translating to us.

This past week, I read an article that asserted that at least 23 words had traveled down through the various versions of language relatively unchanged for the past 15,000 years. I read the article twice to be sure I understood what they were saying: A core vocabulary has remained fairly unchanged from the original Indo-European, and sound remarkably similar in the various regional languages in that area today.

This list includes thou (you), I, not, that, we, who, man, mother, and hand. These are words that would have been used all the time, no matter what time period a person lived in. But as cave-dwellers became farmers, they would have needed new words to describe the soil, the plants and what they were doing with them. And so on until man’s vocabulary became full of ebooks, cyberspace and so on.

A few words that appeared on this basic vocabulary list did surprise the researchers, and one was bark (of a tree). It’s not a word we use incredibly often today, and those not constantly used are the ones that change. Anthropologists explained that 10-15,000 years ago, tree bark would have been extremely important; people would have talked about it all the time.

So, words change over time. It makes me wonder what a rose would have been called way back when. Maybe some sound combination that roughly translates into “pretty thing that stings”?

Who's Your Distant Ancestor?

Back when I was in grade school, I remember one of my sisters preparing a display for her high school science fair project. In that project, she compared Neanderthals to Cro-Magnons. I don’t remember what kind of grade she received, but I found her project fascinating. Two types of humans, living at the same time! I wondered what their interactions would have been like.

Since then, the same question has been explored in various medias. Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear made a big splash with readers as it followed the life of a young Cro-Magnon, also known as a modern human, who was raised by Neanderthals, if I remember correctly. Various educational shows on TV have been made about the Neanderthals, the Homo Sapiens, how they were different, how they were alike, and how they might have interacted before the Neanderthals died out.

The impression I’ve gotten over all these years was that scientists didn’t feel these two species of humans had interbred, and I wondered why they thought that way. Neanderthals are depicted as kind of squat, hairy, with a heavy brow, broad noses and receding chins. I could look around and see people who had those attributes, although it’s usually one per person, not all of them. But no, it seemed we were determined to blame our own ancestors for killing the last of the Neanderthals.

At last, a skeleton has been discovered in northern Italy that appears to be that of a mixed breed. Although mostly that of a modern human, the jaw displays a receding chin. The DNA reveals this person had Neanderthal mitochondrial (maternal) DNA. So it would seem the two species did interbreed, at least once.

Which opens up a whole new mess of ancient ancestors we didn’t realize were in the gene pool.

Sometimes when I’m working out the background for a story, I pick 2 or 3 genetic things to track throughout the population and then work out how those attributes manifest in the population over the generations. The gene for dark hair, for instance, will dominate a gene for lighter hair, and blond will dominate red hair. But after a few generations of almost all the people having dark hair, you will start getting a generation or two of lots of blonds, and a few redheads will crop up. The number of blonds will ebb and flow; the number of redheads tends to remain fairly steady.

I never thought to track the occurrence of receding chins.